Christ the Truth - John 14:6

There is a persistent attack to debilitate the Christian Church from with in, they are not looking to completely destroy it, but to contaminate it & change it into something else, in order to use it for a different purpose for what it was really created. The way they are working to accomplish this is by bringing subtle false doctrines & infiltrating the church with many false teachers.

“There will not be any disassociation between the Universal church, the Sacred Lodge of all true Masons, and the inner circles of the esoteric societies…In this way, the goals and work of the United Nations shall be solidified and a new Church of God, led by all the religions and by all the spiritual groups, shall put an end to the great heresy of separateness.” Theosophist Alice Bailey, more on Fanatic for Jesus

Some of this false doctrines that are gaining acceptance in Christian churches are Western Mysticism, Catholic Mysticism, Contemplative prayer, Gnosticism, etc. We don’t find any of these practices in the Bible.

Mysticism is a word derived from the Greek that means ‘conceal or mystery’. Mysticism is a claim of direct union with God that bypasses the mind & also bypasses the Lord Jesus Christ & His doctrine, He is the only mediator between God & men (1 Timothy 2:5, Acts 4:12, John 4:16). The American Heritage Dictionary defines Mysticism as: Belief in direct experience of transcendent reality or God, especially by means of contemplation and asceticism instead of rational thought.

Mysticism is an attempt to gain ultimate knowledge of God by a direct experience that bypasses the mind. The strong influence of Catholic mysticism has helped immensely to transform the New Age Movement from being merely a counter-culture sub-culture to becoming a new source of spiritual vision for the world. Catholic mysticism has very effectively and subtly invaded many facets of life without being recognized or critically examined. Christiananswers

Mysticism, unity with God is practiced in New Age, Roman Catholicism, Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), Islam (the Sufi sect), Taoism & is also found in Hinduism. As you can notice mysticism would help unite many religions.

These are men performing Sufi whirling a form of physically active meditation

The goal of the New Age Movement has consistently been to bring in the Age of Aquarius when all will recognize “the God within themselves”. Catholic and Eastern mystics claim to discover God in the depths of their being (without Jesus). But the true Christian looks away from himself to the righteousness of Jesus Christ , who suffered in a real world & died on a cross to pay for our sins.

This false doctrine of Mysticism that includes Contemplative prayer, mantra chanting (meditation), Lectio Divina, etc, is being pushed mainly by The Emergent Church Movement, New Apostolic Reformation Movement & The Ecumenical Movement , which are trying to unite us with Rome into one world religion.

Catholic Mysticism

Catholic Mysticism started with what they call the ‘early fathers’ & mothers (nuns) also called the ‘Desert Fathers’, who were hermits and monks that lived a monastic life mainly in the deserts of Egypt in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. Some of them lived in isolation & others adopted rules for communal life that evolved into larger monastic communities.

“In the early Middle Ages, there lived a group of hermits in the wilderness areas of the Middle East. They were known to history as the desert fathers.

“They dwelt in small isolated communities for the purpose of devoting their lives completely to God without distraction. The contemplative movement traces its roots back to these monks. They were the ones who first promoted the mantra as a prayer tool.

“One meditation scholar made this connection when he said: ‘The meditation practices and rules for living of these earliest Christian monks bear strong similarity to those of their Hindu and Buddhist renunciate brethren several kingdoms to the East … the meditative techniques they adopted for finding their God suggest either a borrowing from the East or a spontaneous rediscovery.’ http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com

Contemplative Spirituality: A belief system that uses ancient mystical practices to induce altered states of consciousness (the silence) and is rooted in mysticism and the occult but often wrapped in Christian terminology. The premise of contemplative spirituality is pantheistic (God is all) and panentheistic (God is in all). Common terms used for this movement are “spiritual formation,” “the silence,” “the stillness,” “ancient-wisdom,” “spiritual disciplines,” and many others.

Spiritual Formation: A movement that has provided a platform and a channel through which contemplative prayer is entering the church. Find spiritual formation being used, and in nearly every case you will find contemplative spirituality. In fact, contemplative spirituality is the heartbeat of the spiritual formation movement. Lighthouse Trails

It is particularly difficult to describe this type of prayer in writing, as it is best taught in person. In general however, centering prayer works like this: Choose a word (Jesus or Father, for example) as a focus for contemplative prayer. Repeat the word silently in your mind for a set amount of time (say, twenty minutes) until your heart seems to be repeating the word by itself, just as naturally and involuntarily as breathing. (p. 185). Lighthousetrails

Ancient mysticism is entering the church as Satan re-packages his old deceptions. These movements promoting Mysticism are using familiar Christian words like for example the word Meditation, but the meditation they practice got nothing to do with the biblical meditation, has to do instead with chanting a mantra over & over verbally or mentally to empty their minds to an alpha state to induce a trance or an altered state of consciousness.

For those not familiar with what the “alpha brain patterns” are, here are two descriptions:

Mystical states of consciousness happen in the alpha state . . . The Alpha State also occurs voluntarily during light hypnosis, meditation, biofeedback, day dreaming, hypnogogic and hypnapompic states. 28